Cutter wrote on Jul 12, 2012, 15:25:Portal was original, I'll give them that. Everything else was fast, cheap and easy to do, most of of it built on or around mods/other people's work. And what have they really changed about Steam since it launched. Not much and it's still a shitty UI. What do they spend most of their time doing? Making hats for TF2 and crap like that. So yeah, they are lazy considering how large they are and how much money they have. Imagine what that could accomplish if they were actually focused. I like valve but honestly, their work style reminds me more of government workers than a real business.

Portal started off as a student project at DigiPen where Valve hired the developers. Additionally, L4D was a project where Valve bought the development studio.

Considering the number of employees Valve has, they should be doing at least one full-scale game a year. Then again, Steam has pretty well allowed them to take their time with their projects.